I’ve been told by several people that German is an easy foreign language for English speakers to learn. My experience in the past few months leads me to believe otherwise. I always thought that German was a logical language where it was enough to follow the rules. Well that may be true, but there are hundreds of rules and as many exceptions.

Despite this, I haven’t been put off, and fairly early on I discovered Anki which is an incredible tool to help with learning vocabulary (Apparently this kind or tool is called an SRS or Spaced repetition system. Flashcards to you and I). Vocab learning was never my strong point, but Anki really helps. Whether I have 10 minutes on the U-Bahn or an hour in the evening, I can quickly assimilate a few dozen more words.

However the dearth of dictionary files was an initial problem, so I have created a beginners file from various sources, which may be of use to any other beginning German learners. Check out my English-German Anki deck. I’ve been adding to this file for the past few months, and I hope it is as error-free as possible, but if you do find any errors, please let me know and I’ll correct them.

I’ve also uploaded the file to Google docs, if anyone wants write access to modify/improve the data, let me know. I’ll update the anki file with the latest greatest version.

Hi – I just discovered Anki and your blog post. I would love to be able to use your deck, too! Thank you for sharing it! I downloaded it from the link, but Anki won’t import it. Any idea why that might be? I’ve been able to import other Anki decks without a problem. I hope I can get yours to work.

Hi,
I’ve updated the file. When you have downloaded this file : http://bemused.org/blog/?attachment_id=200 you need to unzip it (if this hasn’t already been done), and make sure you have a file called english-german.anki – you should be able to load this directly into Anki